My dear Meldola,--I have just read your reply to Romanes in _Nature_, and so far as your view goes I agree, but it does not go far enough. Professor Newton has called my attention to a passage in Belt's "Nicaragua," pp. 207-8, in which he puts forth very clearly exactly your view. I find I had noted the explanation as insufficient, and I hear that in Darwin's copy there is "No! No!" against it. It seems, however, to me to summarise _all_ that is of the slightest value in Romanes' wordy paper. I have asked Newton (to whom I had lent it) to forward to you at Birmingham a proof of my paper in the _Fortnightly_, and I shall be much obliged if you will read it carefully, and, if you can, "hold a brief" for me at the British Association in this matter. You will see that a considerable part of my paper is devoted to a demonstration of the fallacy of that part of "Romanes" which declares species to be distinguished generally by useless characters, and also that "simultaneous variations" do not usually occur. On the question of sterility, which, as you well observe, is the core of the question, I think I show that it could not work in the way Romanes puts it. The objection to Belt's and your view is, also, that it would not work unless the "sterility variation" was correlated with the "useful variation." You assume, I think, this correlation, when you speak of two of your varieties, B. and K., being _less fertile with the parent form_. Without correlation they could not be so, only some few of them. Romanes always speaks of his physiological variations as being independent, "primary," in which case, as I show, they could hardly ever survive. At the end of my paper I show a correlation which is probably general and sufficient.